There was a moment of strained silence.
"WRC—Washington!" he exclaimed at last. "Write down these settings, Madeline. And get the angles on the loop, too, both the vertical and horizontal, for we'll need them."
The loop had been made so that it could be rotated in two planes, giving its defection toward the earth when lying on its side.
"But this may be coming from a long distance," said Fairs, anxiously. "We may be miles away, perhaps nowhere near the Atlantic coast."
"We're within fifty miles of Washington," replied Kent decisively. "I knew this set, and it wouldn't come in this loud any farther away. Here, listen for yourself."
Removing the headphones, he handed them to Fairs. Seeing the wistful look in the girl's eyes, he drew one phono from the clips and for several minutes the scientist and his daughter listened to the music which was being broadcast from the capital. There were tears in the eyes of both when they turned to Kent.
"It is wonderful," breathed Madeline. "A great invention—but more wonderful because it gives us back our world. I shall never be lonely again."
"It may give us back the world in a very literal sense," remarked Kent. "I have a plan which may be worked out, but first we must determine exactly how we move above the earth."
Taking the phones, he began the hunt for a second station.
"Charlotte, North Carolina," he stated in a few minutes. "We must be somewhere between there and Washington, for the vertical angles are almost in line and the horizontal angles are in opposite directions."
For three hours this process was repeated, during which time more than a hundred stations were picked up and carefully recorded, with the time of reception. Then Kent shut down the set and bent over a world map which had been torn from an atlas in the library.
"We are over the Pacific," he explained to the others. "There won't be anything but a ship or two for a long time, and we couldn't know their locations so we might as well trace our passage across the United States. By plotting the angles on stations which we caught at about the same time we can get a fixed position for that instant."
He began work with pencil and rule, while Faire read the angles.
"There are four stations on which the loop pointed straight down," he continued. "That is, the vertical angle was ninety degrees, indicating that we were directly over the stations. These four were WBBL, Richmond; WEAC, Columbus; WOC, Davenport, and KEPT at Salt Lake City. The curve drawn through these places shows that we touched first at Cape Hatteras and then moved in an upward arc across the country, our highest point being just south of Sioux City, Iowa. From Salt Lake City we curved back southward until we reached the Pacific, just below Monterey Bay, California. And, judging from the intersections of the inclination angles, we are about ninety thousand feet above the earth."
Faire scrutinized the map closely.
"This are must pass through Guam," he remarked, "since you were caught up at that point. A continuation of the curve will cut through Singapore and then dip down below the equator. From that it would appear there is a second arc which covers the Indian Ocean, crosses Africa just above Cape Town and then swings up between Africa and South America until it begins at Hatteras again."
Kent nodded.
"I think you are right. I can't understand why we don't travel in a straight line around the earth, or
